REDEFINING ADVENTURE
The flight schedule looked horrendous and let’s be honest, economy class is a device used to perpetuate class war while the airline pilot aids the subjugation of the masses by spreading mind control agents via chemtrails. OK, sorry... I just went down a YouTube rabbit hole. There is apparently a mile-wide alien spaceship under the Arctic, by the way. But just for the record, I don’t believe any of this shit, so I’ll back it down and get to the story at hand.
The flight schedule. Ah yes, international flight from Australia is an inevitably long and boring affair but the chance to travel to Morocco to ride the long-awaited KTM 790 Adventure and Adventure R was far too good to pass up. After being home for a very short period of time, I fed my fish, my dog, my cats and my kid and packed my gearbag for another adventure.
Now, I’m not a big details man. I’ll absorb the where and when but the in-between I tend to skip and it’s often a surprise to me. I may agree to my partner booking a restaurant, but I’ll then arrive at the agreed time and place only to find to my meat-eating horror it was a vegan establishment — I got the where and when but not the details.
It’s this habit that led to a full day as a tourist in Casablanca, which saw me bouncing from an opulent mosque to looking for an oven mitt (long story) in an ancient part of the city referred to as “old Medina”, as well as meeting former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Perez’s nephew in the Jewish quarter far from the tourist haunts.
CASABLANCA IS A CITY OF SIGHTS, SOUNDS AND SMELLS — SPECIFICALLY, FERAL CATS, URINE AND CAR HORNS
You see, I had tried to book our bags in for a flight to Errachidia a few hours early. It was the last flight of three and Tom (Foster from Adventure Rider mag) and I were pretty cooked, but as we walked away from the desk the lady said, “You know these flights are for tomorrow night, right?”
Yeah, details man. I read the times but not the dates. This meant we had a night and a full day in Casablanca to be reluctant tourists.
Casablanca is a city of sights, sounds and smells — specifically, feral cats, urine and car horns. It’s not far from an offi cial classification of a shithole, to be honest, but we did meet a brilliant local bloke called Bakrim Omar who recognised our accents and decided to give us the tour that you won’t get on a tourist bus. He also defended us from a despicable vendor who would attempt to rip Tom off with an overpriced oven mitt. Apparently he thought we were American and therefore should pay three times the original price.
From Casablanca we flew to Errachidia, which took less time in the air than it did
